Supporting Business Growth: Data-Driven Insights from Liberis

At Liberis, we’re passionate about giving small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) the financial tools they need to succeed. We’ve been doing this for over 17 years, and we have a ton of data to show for it. This data is incredibly valuable, and it’s something traditional lenders often overlook. It allows us to understand what makes businesses successful and to fund many more of them around the world.

Our new data platform is a game-changer. It lets us run experiments with this data quickly and easily – in just 48 hours in some cases!

Data is at the heart of everything we do at Liberis. Whether we’re assessing a merchant’s performance or evaluating the impact of a new feature, data guides our actions. This approach requires seamless collaboration across teams and choosing technologies that enable swift execution.

Our marketing team, for instance, wanted to tailor their strategies based on insights like past performance and industry strength. Using our data, they can now market more effectively to different merchants.

Using our extensive data from the Business Cash Advance (BCA) product, we estimate a merchant’s repayment rate based on factors like business size, monthly revenue, and industry.

The Performance vs Expectation (PvE) metric is one of our most critical metrics at the individual merchant level. If a merchant falls short of expectations, our operations agents step in to offer support and solutions to get them back on track.

This metric is also beneficial for partners. By aggregating this data, partners can see if their merchants are performing above, on track, or below expectations and how this changes over time. This insight helps partners understand the impact of attributes like seasonality and industry on their merchants.

An essential data point we collect is the Merchant Category Code (MCC) of our merchants. Stripe has a great guide about MCC codes and their importance to the finance industry. For Liberis, MCC codes provide targeted benefits to our partners and merchants.

The Revenue Performance vs. Peers metric is a composite metric that provides information on how a merchant’s revenue compares to others within their industry. This can help partners decide which businesses to target with their marketing efforts. For example, a partner might see that restaurants tend to perform well with Liberis products and choose to focus their marketing on that industry.

This metric measures a single merchant’s revenue growth by comparing the current month’s revenue to the previous month’s to see if revenue is increasing or decreasing.

Strong revenue growth is a great sign that our products are helping businesses succeed. We’re more likely to offer these businesses preferential renewal terms. We can also use this data to see if certain industries or regions are being affected by broader trends.

One great example of how our products help businesses is Steve, the owner of Two Magpies Bakeries. Since using Liberis’s BCA product in 2018, Steve has grown his business from one store to over 10 cafes and 3 production units! Read the full case study here.

From initial idea to execution, we made these metrics consumable via an API and within our internal tools within a few days of first discussing the feasibility. This approach is possible due to our choice of data platform technologies and our organisational structure.

We work cross-functionally, allowing one engineer and one analyst to produce new metrics for the rest of Liberis by directly collaborating with the teams who use this data. Our focus on modernising our data platform and this collaborative approach to data enables quick experimentation with new ways of defining metrics and serving data, providing value to the business swiftly.

This post is the first in a series about transforming our use of data and how we use a pragmatic data mesh approach at Liberis to provide invaluable data insights at scale with ease.